As a graduate student at Harvard Medical School in the 1990s, Robert Means had his name on 18 publications. Currently, Means is a professor of pathology at the Yale School of Medicine, as well as director of graduate admissions for the microbiology program.

He has spent two decades in science. Now, Means said, he is leaving not only Yale, but science altogether.

At the end of June, Means contract with Yale will be up, largely because he was unable to bring in additional sources of funding to run his lab.

Ive still got projects going on that every day get me excited about science, but the rest of it the managerial side of applying for grants that basically means life or death for your career I have become so sullied by, he said. Im going in a different direction because it doesnt feel like, in this climate, that I can be intellectually free and still make a viable career out of it.

What happened to Means at Yale is symptomatic of a national crisis in science funding, he said, particularly in biomedical research.

The National Institute of Health doubled its budget between 1998 and 2003, wrote graduate school dean Thomas Pollard in an article for Cell, leaving funding for biomedical research seeming relatively secure. But a combination of inflation since 2003 and a 5 percent cut in all NIH grant funding during the budget sequester of 2013 has left the current outlook for funding in the United States grim.

Yale has mechanisms in place to help support faculty struggling to secure research, but the Universitys funds alone cannot insulate its researchers from the present climate. Government funding remains science researchers primary source of support, and those who lack it may find their labs in jeopardy.

Increasingly, researchers are looking for supplementary financial support from private foundations and corporate sponsors, many of which will underwrite research that investigates a specific disease or drug. Yet some worry this shift will leave basic science research, traditionally underwritten by public sources, by the wayside.

For all its impact on researchers, the greatest casualty of the funding climate may be the next generation of scientists.

I feel that if we really want to keep an edge on creativity, we need to make it easier for people to enter the system and fund it at a greater level than we are right now, said genetics professor Arthur Horwich. Were scaring people away.

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